So, the project I've been struggling with the last 4 months has been to "simply" reproduce a bunch of old photos (40s-90s) as accurately as possible, e.g scan them, print them, and hold them up side-by-side and have them look pretty close. This has been a project that's been on my mom's to-do list for a while but I had been putting it off because my past experience with a non-color-managed workflow of scanning and printing had been extremely frustrating and disappointing. It's been suddenly made a priority because of family circumstances I don't need to get into, but the hope was to have some of this working quite a while ago.
Last year I tried doing some research so that I could "do it right" - so I bought an Epson v800, i1Studio, a Canon Pro-10 and a Pro-100 (pigment vs dye), subscribed to Adobe, bought VueScan, got sample paper packs from different sources, a Rotatrim, and even sourced an old English Deckle cutter that nearly perfectly matches the jagged cuts of the old B&W photos – it's surprisingly awesome btw. Anyway, I tried to jump right in and just push the buttons and make it work and everything looked like crap. I spent months researching everything I could understand, with a lot of misinformation and red herrings. I was very disappointed with the X-Rite results, but I think some of that was my ignorance, broken printer profiles, and a lack of documentation. I spent months reading, experimenting, re-reading, playing with Argyll CMS (which really brings a lot of capability to my i1Studio!), etc. without much luck, landing me here.
I have a computer science degree, I write software, repair computers, and consult on other IT-related areas so I'm comfortable with the command line, working with numbers, writing scripts to get things done, etc. But this color management stuff is new to me obviously, and I'm not an artist and have trouble speaking in color. I would like to think that there's an ideal workflow for my reproduction project, but there's a surprising lack of documentation for scanner-based reproduction work.
Like I mentioned back on page 1, most of the stuff I came across specifically said to never use Absolute, but in reading some other threads on this forum I gave it a shot and it helped quite a bit with what I was trying to do. Now, it's possible it's still wrong and it's just compensating for some other broken part of my workflow which I'm willing to accept.
One of the threads I gathered info on using Absolute was this: Getting Blue Colors "right" -
http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=106697.0 There were a few choice quotes from that thread:
If a friend gives you a 4x5 borderless print and asks you to enlarge it to an 8x10 the proper way to do it is to scan it with a scene referred profile. Resize it. Then print it using Absolute Colorimetric Intent. As long as the print media has a gamut that is as large as that in the scanned image there is no art to it. Just the science and the numbers. The OP is scanning something and wishes to reproduce it. A good scanner profile and AC printing is the best way to do it.
Graeme Gill had a post in that thread also about tracking the color through the workflow, which I'd like to do though I had trouble interpreting how to perform the exact steps. I might circle around to this again when I get back to scanning.
Doug also had good advice at the end of that thread:
Divide up the issues and address one at a time. Trying to get everything "right" without using instruments to measure each aspect separately, is a hard and frustrating process.
Which is what I'm attempting to do currently is break things up into manageable chunks. Thanks to the help I've received here I have improved my computer to printer results, at least numerically. Though I still have a follow-up about printing in absolute:
1. Given a hypothetically perfect paper profile: if printing an image using Absolute to two different papers that have a large enough gamut for the image, would the output look identical? I ask because even now that my paper profiles have dEs of around 1.0, there's still a visible difference in color temp between my test prints on different papers. They're very close, but I can tell that one looks warmer and the other colder.
Image white patch: 95.190, -1.030, 2.930
Plus Glossy II absolute: 94.190, -1.968, 3.164
Plus Glossy II white point: 94.5493467, -0.813282, -2.3624075
Pecos Gloss absolute: 94.770, -1.265, 3.539
Pecos Gloss white point: 94.959037, -0.0461172, -1.3828287
The Glossy II print looks a tad yellower to my eyes. The Glossy II is glossier if that matter.
2. To see what the affect would be with Relative (because it seems like it's the thing to use for most other circumstances), the same white patch for the Pecos Gloss shifts to 90.39, -1.093, 1.484. Despite the dramatic drop in lightness, the actual print seems to have more contrast. Maybe I don't need to get distracted by that just yet, but it wasn't what I was expecting.
At any rate, where I'm at now seem so look like the right direction for printing. Based on data I've collected today I think it's still primarily my scanning that's off by quite a bit. Not sure if I should continue on this thread with that topic or start a new one. I suppose it would still technically involve absolute intents.